After 43 days, the longest US government shutdown in history is coming to an end.

Federal workers will start receiving pay again. National Parks will reopen. Government services that had been curtailed or suspended entirely will resume. Air travel, which had become a nightmare for many Americans, will return to being merely frustrating.

After the dust settles and the ink from President Donald Trump’s signature on the funding bill dries, what has this record-setting shutdown accomplished? And what has it cost?

Senate Democrats, through their use of the parliamentary filibuster, were able to trigger the shutdown despite being a minority in the chamber by refusing to go along with a Republican measure to temporarily fund the government.

They drew a line in the sand, demanding that the Republicans agree to extend health insurance subsidies for low-income Americans that are set to expire at the end of the year.

When a handful of Democrats broke ranks to vote to reopen the government on Sunday, they received next to nothing in return – a promise of a vote in the Senate on the subsidies, but no guarantees of Republican support or even a necessary vote in the House of Representatives.

Since then, members of the party’s left flank have been furious.

They’ve accused Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer – who didn’t vote for the funding bill – of being secretly complicit in the reopening plan or simply incompetent. They’ve felt like their party folded even after off-year election success showed they had the upper hand. They feared that the shutdown sacrifices had been for nothing.

Even more mainstream Democrats, like California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, called the shutdown deal “pathetic” and a “surrender”.

“I’m not coming in to punch anybody in the face,” he told the Associated Press, “but I’m not pleased that, in the face of this invasive species that is Donald Trump, who’s completely changed the rules of the game, that we’re still playing by the old rules of the game.”

Newsom has 2028 presidential ambitions and can be a good barometer for the mood of the party. He was a loyal supporter of Joe Biden who turned out to defend the then-president even after his disastrous June debate performance against Trump.

If he is running for the pitchforks, it’s not a good sign for Democratic leaders.

For Trump, in the days since the Senate deadlock broke on Sunday, his mood has gone from cautious optimism to celebration.

On Tuesday, he congratulated congressional Republicans and called the vote to reopen the government “a very big victory”.

“We’re opening up our country,” he said at a Veteran’s Day commemoration at Arlington Cemetery. “It should have never been closed.”

Trump, perhaps sensing the Democratic anger toward Schumer, joined the pile-on during a Fox News interview on Monday night.

“He thought he could break the Republican Party, and the Republicans broke him,” Trump said of the Senate Democrat.

Although there were times when Trump appeared to be buckling – last week he berated Senate Republicans for refusing to scrap the filibuster to reopen the government – he ultimately emerged from the shutdown having made little in the way of substantive concessions.

While his poll numbers have declined over the last 40 days, there’s still a year before Republicans have to face voters in the midterms. And, barring some kind of constitutional rewrite, Trump never has to worry about standing for election again.

With the end of the shutdown, Congress will get back to its regularly scheduled programming. Although the House of Representatives has effectively been on ice for more than a month, Republicans still hope they can pass some substantive legislation before next year’s election cycle kicks in.

While several government departments will be funded until September in the shutdown-ending agreement, Congress will have to approve spending for the rest of the government by the end of January to avoid another shutdown.

Democrats, licking their wounds, may be hankering for another chance to fight.

Meanwhile, the issue they fought over – healthcare subsidies – could become a pressing concern for tens of millions of Americans who will see their insurance costs double or triple at the end of the year. Republicans ignore addressing such voter pain at their own political peril.

And that isn’t the only peril facing Trump and the Republicans. A day that was supposed to be highlighted by the House government-funding vote was spent dwelling on the latest revelations surrounding the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Later on Wednesday, Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was sworn in to her congressional seat and became the 218th and final signatory on a petition that will force the House of Representatives to hold a vote ordering the justice department to release all its files on the Epstein case.

It was enough to prompt Trump to complain, on his Truth Social website, that his government-funding success was being eclipsed.

“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” he wrote.

It was all a very clear reminder that the best-laid plans and political strategies can be derailed in a flash.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called for international action to cut off the supply of weapons to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who are accused of mass killings in el-Fasher.

At the end of a G7 foreign ministers meeting in Canada, Rubio said the RSF had committed systematic atrocities, including murder, rape and sexual violence against civilians.

Sudan’s army accuses the United Arab Emirates of propping up the RSF with weapons and mercenaries sent via African nations. The UAE has repeatedly denied these allegations.

The RSF has been fighting the Sudanese army since April 2023, when a power struggle between their leaders erupted into all-out civil war.

It is not clear how much impact Rubio’s call will have. A previous US-backed proposal for a humanitarian ceasefire in Sudan has already been violated by the RSF, even though they agreed to it last week.

El-Fasher was captured last month by the RSF after an 18-month siege, meaning they now control all of the cities in the vast western Darfur region.

Only a small fraction of the population has managed to flee the city, where massacres are said to have take taken place. Piles of bodies on the ground and blood-stained earth are visible from space in satellite imagery.

Non-Arab groups in the wider Darfur region are being systematically targeted by the RSF in what amounts to genocide, according to the US and humanitarian groups.

At the talks near Niagara Falls on Monday, America’s top diplomat said women and children had been targeted in acts of the most horrific kind by the RSF in el-Fasher.

Rubio told reporters: “They’re committing acts of sexual violence and atrocities, just horrifying atrocities, against women, children, innocent civilians of the most horrific kind. And it needs to end immediately.

“And we’re going to do everything we can to bring it to an end, and we’ve encouraged partner nations to join us in this fight.”

However, Rubio stopped short of publicly criticising Abu Dhabi, in spite of evidence that the Gulf state is the RSF’s main arms supplier, presented in investigations by the international media that the UN has found credible.

The Trump administration is working for an end to the war together with the UAE, as well as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who are allies of Sudan’s military-led government.

The four nations are known as the “Quad”. In September, they jointly proposed a three-month humanitarian truce, followed by a permanent ceasefire and a nine-month transition to civilian rule.

The RSF waited until it had captured el-Fasher before announcing that it was agreeing to the truce. Sudan’s army says it objects to the UAE’s presence in the Quad but will still consider the proposal.

In the meantime, there has been no let-up in the fighting.

The secretary of state rejected the paramilitary group’s attempt to blame the killings on rogue elements, saying this was false and the attacks were systematic.

Asked by the BBC about his assessment of the likely scale of atrocities, he said the US feared that thousands of people who had been expected to flee el-Fasher were either dead or too malnourished to move.

He said the RSF, lacking its own arms manufacturing facilities, relied on outside support, and called for countries supplying weapons to stop.

The joint G7 statement also condemned surging violence in Sudan, saying the conflict between the army and the RSF had triggered “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis”.

To date, more than 150,000 people have been killed and about 12 million have had no choice but to flee their homes.

The flow of weapons into the country during this two-year-long civil war has been analysed by various experts.

Amnesty International says it has found evidence of weapons manufactured in Serbia, Russia, China, Turkey, Yemen and UAE being used in Sudan.

The smuggling route is often via the UAE, through to Chad, then into Darfur – according to a leaked report by UN experts.

The UAE in particular is accused of providing arms and support to the RSF, who in turn are accused of using the UAE as a marketplace for illicit gold sales.

All parties deny these allegations.

A fortnight ago, the UK government came under fire from its own lawmakers following allegations that British-made weapons were ending up in the hands of the RSF, who were using them to commit atrocities.

In response to one MP’s demand to “end all arms shipments to the UAE until it is proved that the UAE is not arming the RSF”, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said at the time: “The UK has extremely strong controls on arms exports, including to prevent any diversion. We will continue to take that immensely seriously.”

There has been a UN arms embargo on the RSF’s stronghold of Darfur since 2004, but it has not been extended to the rest of the country despite calls from human rights groups.